this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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I was looking at code.golf the other day and I wondered which languages were the least verbose, so I did a little data gathering.

I looked at 48 different languages that had completed 79 different code challenges on code.golf. I then gathered the results for each language and challenge. If a "golfer" had more than 1 submission to a challenge, I grabbed the most recent one. I then dropped the top 5% and bottom 5% to hopefully mitigate most outliers. Then came up with an average for each language, for each challenge. I then averaged the results across each language and that is what you see here.

For another perspective, I ranked each challenge then got the average ranking across all challenges. Below is the results of that.

Disclaimer: This is in no way scientific. It's just for fun. If you know of a better way to sort these results please let me know.

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[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 year ago (11 children)

Java placed way better than I expected

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago

You can write concise Java. Just like you can write readable Haskell. It’s just not idiomatic to do so.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

System.out.print("I agree.");

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (4 children)

It is always dismissed as too verbose, while in go’s case it is never mentioned, when in fact the latter is way more verbose.. People’s bias show.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Maybe also bias by the number / experience of people using it.

1st semester students getting shocked by public static void main(String args) and meming it on the internet.

Go on the other hand likely isn't a common choice / option for a first language.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I will gladly complain any day about go being terribly verbose.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Code Golf rules allow people to submit an anonymous function instead of a full program, which eliminates a lot of the boilerplate.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

They weren't writing enterprise Java or they'd need a dozen factories and a few factory factories and probably a factory factory factory just to be safe.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don’t know the specifics of the golf problems, but I’m mostly in c#, also notorious for “having too much boilerplate,” and it looks like it’s 3rd by char count.

My guess is that languages with comprehensive standard libraries can do more with less custom code. As you should expect.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'd love to see the same comparison with more real-world use-cases.

Code golf, is mostly pretty simple use-cases, which have been optimized many times over.

When, you build out an application with a user-interface, proper event handling, etc.... c++ is MUCH more verbose then c# for example, and they are ranked pretty close together.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think code golf is a great dataset for this kind of analysis specifically because they are artificial and people are paying attention to the number of characters used. Leetcode solutions might be a better option though.

In real world projects there are too many confounding factors. People aren’t implementing servers in brainfuck or websites in C. Even rewrites of a project into another language have more/fewer features. So it’s an apples to oranges comparison.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Not expected C# to be this high. Also did not expected F# be so far away from C#.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah that seems suspicious. F# is pretty succinct.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

My guess is that this is really a measure of how much abuse the language will tolerate. C# probably lets you get away with a bunch of things (like checking for nulls) that F# requires.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

In newer versions of C# you can use top level statements, which remove a lot of characters

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago

On another look, though, we have to keep in mind, though that this is code-golf, so in no way representative for actual code-bases.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Haskell being so high really doesn't make any sense. Experience level maybe?

It's one of the tersest languages out there.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Bash being so high is what confuses me.

Damn near everything is an acronym

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I guess it takes more calls to different programs to do a task

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

It's hard make such comparisons on "real world" code, and challenges use to be more attractive to people trying to learn, so your hypothesis make sense.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I'm really surprised to see Java ranked as less-verbose than OCaml.

Here's an equivalent code sample in Java 17 vs OCaml:

Java:

abstract sealed class Expr permits Value, Add, Subtract, Multiply, Divide {
  abstract long eval();
}
record Value(long value) extends Expr {
  @Override
  long eval() { return value; }
}
record Add(Expr left, Expr right) {   
  @Override
  long eval() { return left.eval() + right.eval(); }
}
record Subtract(Expr left, Expr right) {
  @Override
  long eval() { return left.eval() - right.eval(); }
}
record Multiply(Expr left, Expr right) {
  @Override
  long eval() { return left.eval() * right.eval(); }
}
record Divide(Expr left, Expr right) {
  @Override
  long eval() { return left.eval() / right.eval(); }
}

OCaml:

type expr = 
  | Value of int
  | Add of expr * expr
  | Subtract of expr * expr
  | Multiply of expr * expr
  | Divide of expr * expr

let rec eval = function 
  | Value value -> value
  | Add (left, right) -> (eval left) + (eval right)
  | Subtract (left, right) -> (eval left) - (eval right)
  | Multiply (left, right) -> (eval left) * (eval right)
  | Divide (left, right) -> (eval left) / (eval right)

....Java has so much more syntactical overhead than OCaml, and that's even with recent Java and being pretty aggressive about using boiler-plate reducing sugars like Records. And F# has even less, since it doesn't require you to use different operators for numerics or do as much manual casting between strings/numerics

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Just gonna drop by to say that I love Crystal

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hmm interesting, I would've thought that Haskell would rank much higher

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm surprised C is so low. I feel like I need to write 5x more code (compared to C++/Rust) to do the exact same thing.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Everyone's comparing the placements of their favorite language and I'm just left wondering how GolfScript gets beaten by seven other languages. I take it out was created specifically to do well on code golf? Mission failed, I guess.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What the heck is brainfuck?? Maybe a hot take but I wouldn't wanna program in that /s

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

------[-->+++<]>.--------.-.----------.+.+++++++++++++.[-->+++++<]>+++.+[->+++<]>+.+..[--->+<]>+++.++[---->+<]>+.+[----->+<]>+.+++++++.-.++++++.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is why I love Ruby: Nearly as concise as Python but never complains about whitespace or indentation.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I've never understood the complaint about forced indentation. What kind of monster doesn't use indentation for their code anyway?

If anything, it's nice that the language forces it on you so that you don't stumble on code written by one of those monsters.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

For me at least, it's less about forcing indentation as much as limiting what I can do with visual indentation.

Sometimes, it's nice to group lines at a given indentation level for visual comprehension vs the needs of the interpreter.

And to be fair, I don't hate Python's indentation style. It's usually not a major problem in practice. It's just that without the ability to override it, I lose a tool for expressing intent.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why would golfscript be more verbose than some others? Isn't it made for golfing?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Rest in pieces golfcels it's pychad time

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm suprised by F# position

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Would assembly be higher or lower than brainfuck?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Assembly would be lower. You have more complex / direct instructions in assembly. Brain fuck is pretty much just a pure turing machine, and has 8 instructions.

X86 has ~ 1000 + variants. Even ARM with a smaller instruction set has 232 instructions.

In brain fuck to set a number you'd have to count up (or down - underflow) to that number. In assembly you just set it.

Somewhere I've read that current assembly code with Makros should be similar to writing C.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Interesting that zig is so much lower than c in expressiveness. Isn't that a bit weird?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Is Dart inherently verbose, or does it just seem that way because people are using it to make Flutter widgets and they're verbose? When you look at the Dart syntax it doesn't seem like it needs to be verbose, but Flutter code certainly can be.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

This is from codegolf competitions, so non-Flutter I'd assume.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's interesting, the results here are way different than the Code Golf & Coding Challenges Stack Exchange. I would never expect Haskell to be that low. But after looking at code.golf, I realize it's because I/O on CG&CC is more relaxed. Most Haskell submissions are functions which return the solution.

Sidenote: I like the CG&CC method, it's semi-competitive, semi-cooperative.

  • all languages welcome
  • almost all users post "Try it Online"/"Attempt This Online" links
  • most users post explanations under their submissions
  • often people will post solutions beginning with "port of user1234's excellent Foolang answer" when there's a clever shortcut someone finds
  • or people will post their own solution with "here's a solution which doesn't use user1234's algorithm"
  • or people will add comments to answers with minor improvements

IMO It's geared towards what is the best part about code golf: teaching people about algorithm design and language design.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How come kotlin isn't there

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

With my professional experience in COBOL, I can honestly say I'm not surprised at all!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

~~Rust is so brief it's not even listed~~ I can't read

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